In 2009, Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden sentenced Robert H. Richards IV to eight years in prison but suspended the sentence in lieu of probation. Richards was also ordered "participate in a sex offenders" treatment program in Massachusetts and was forbidden from contact with children 16 and younger.

"[The] defendant will not fare well in Level 5 [prison] setting," Jarden wrote in her order, according to Delaware Online. Raw Story notes that Richards, who is 6’4" and 276 pounds, does not suffer from any physical illnesses or disabilities.

Richards pleaded guilty to fourth-degree rape in 2008, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. The felony charge was publicly released for the first time earlier this month, after Richard’s ex-wife filed a lawsuit accusing him of also raping their young son.

BP has recently more than doubled their estimate of how much crude oil has leaked into Lake Michigan following a spill from the Whiting refinery in northwest Indiana. Officials are now pegging the number between 15 and 39 barrels, each of which contains 42 gallons of crude oil, up from just 9-18 barrels.

While comparatively minor compared to other recent incidents, Lake Michigan serves as an water source for some 7 million people; the 68th St. water intake crib is just 8 miles northwest of the spill. It’s also unclear just what BP let leak into the water; conventional crude oil is bad enough, but the refinery was recently upgraded to handle much higher amounts of heavy crude derived from tar sands, which is much more difficult to clean up.

Despite this, there’s barely been any major media coverage of the incident, which raises serious questions about BP safety standards as the Whiting facility ramps up processing of tar sands crude.

Even the state’s senators are concerned. Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Dick Durbin, both from Illinois, say that "Given the Whiting refinery’s recent expansion of its operations to double the amount of heavy oil sands being processed, this spill raises questions about the long-term safety and reliability of BP’s new, expanded production."

"The discussion between Doocy and Rivera went along the line that media outlets want to portray Republicans as hypocrites when caught being corrupt and never want to label Democrats as it goes against their preconceived narrative.

Then, Rivera made the following statement:

“Usually, the politicians who are robbing on the democratic side tend to be ethnic politicians, as in these cases…We are the antidote to that particular problem.”"

For once, perfectionist Gwyneth Paltrow had the public’s sympathy this week when she announced that she and her Coldplay frontman-husband, Chris Martin, were separating after 10 years and two children together.

But any twinge of compassion for the Oscar-winning actress-turned-GOOP lifestyle guru quickly vanished after the 41-year-old said it was harder for her to parent than for regular working moms who go into an office every day.

“It’s much harder for me,” Paltrow said in an E! News interview. "I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening. When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day and that part of it is very difficult.”

“I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set," she continued.

As any human can imagine, parents were outraged at the "Iron Man" actress’ comments.

“’Thank God I don’t make millions filming one movie per year,’ is what I say to myself pretty much every morning as I wait on a windy Metro-North platform, about to begin my 45-minute commute into the city," Dawson wrote in a piece for The New York Post.

Silver’s data-driven journalism website FiveThirtyEight made one of its first major political predictions since its relaunch: Republicans will take back the Senate in the midterm elections behind held later this year

Silver’s data-based journalism site FiveThirtyEight relaunched last week with new backing from ESPN and made its first prediction about this year’s midterm elections since last July. Silver says current polling suggests the GOP will win at least six seats in the Senate, enough to give them an overall majority.

Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the 2012 presidential election battle between President Barack Obama and Republican contender Mitt Romney. That same year, Silver correctly predicted 31 of 33 U.S. senate races. He announced in 2013 that FiveThirtyEight would move from The New York Times to become a standalone site under the auspices of ESPN.

According to FiveThirtyEight, here’s what would need to happen for the Republicans to take advantage of the drop in Obama’s approval ratings and win the senate:

Republicans have great opportunities in a number of states, but only in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Arkansas do we rate the races as clearly leaning their way. Republicans will also have to win at least two toss-up races, perhaps in Alaska, North Carolina or Michigan, or to convert states such as New Hampshire into that category. And they’ll have to avoid taking losses of their own in Georgia and Kentucky, where the fundamentals favor them but recent polls show extremely competitive races.”

However, Silver says that it “wouldn’t take much” for the Democrats to recalibrate in the coming months and pull ahead.

One of the first articles on Nate Silver’s highly anticipated data-driven news site used flawed data to make its conclusions, according to some of the nation’s top climate scientists.

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight published its first article about climate change on Wednesday, entitled “Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change.” But climate scientists are condemning the article and its author, Roger Pielke Jr., saying he ignored critical data to produce a “deeply misleading” result.

The crux of Pielke’s article is this: Extreme weather events are costing us more and more money, but that is not because climate change is making extreme weather more frequent or intense. The reason we are losing more money, rather, is because we have more money to lose. Pielke came to this conclusion by measuring rising disaster damage costs alongside the rising global Gross Domestic Product. He also cited a U.N. climate report, along with his own research, to assert that extreme weather events have not been increasing in frequency or intensity.

“Pielke’s piece is deeply misleading, confirming some of my worst fears that Nate Silver’s new venture may become yet another outlet for misinformation when it comes to the issue of human-caused climate change,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “Pielke uses a very misleading normalization procedure that likely serves to remove the very climate change-related damage signal that he claims to not be able to find.”

Pielke, a political scientist who has proven to be Silver’s mostcontroversialhire to date, has actually been making his argument about increased disaster costs for years.

His story in FiveThirtyEight is one that he has written before, in Chapter 7 of his 2011 book “The Climate Fix.” Just like in his article, the chapter argues that increased wealth and development is the principal cause of increased monetary losses from extreme weather events — not more extreme weather from climate change.

But just as Pielke’s article has been written before, so too it has been criticized before. Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, a distinguished senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has criticized Pielke’s data for its simplistic nature. Simply showing that an increase in damage has corresponded to an increase in wealth ignores the fact that communities are now more prepared than ever for extreme storms, Trenberth wrote at the time.

“This is the same old wrong Roger,” Trenberth said by e-mail. “He is demonstrably wrong and misleads.”

Mann agrees that the data analysis is too simplistic. “Pielke, in this case, continues to use an extremely controversial ‘normalization’ procedure when analyzing these data,” he told Climate Progress in an e-mail. “That procedure assumes that damages increase with population but it completely ignores technological innovations (sturdier buildings, hurricane-resistant structures, better weather forecasting, etc.) that have served to reduce societal vulnerability, thus likely masking some of the aggravating impacts of climate change.”

Pielke’s article also says that intensifying weather events can’t be causing more damage, because they aren’t occurring in the first place. Pielke cites the fifth IPCC’s report, which he said showed “little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.”

“In fact, today’s climate models suggest that future changes in extremes that cause the most damage won’t be detectable in the statistics of weather (or damage) for many decades,” Pielke wrote, citing his own research.

(Reuters) – Mexican restaurants in the United States are being squeezed by a sudden jump in the price of limes, an essential ingredient, which has led managers in places like San Antonio that are a hotbed for the cuisine to alter recipes.

"Mexico received some heavy rains that destroyed a large amount of the lime crop, so with limited supplies we are seeing lime prices skyrocket," Bryan Black, director of communications for the Texas Department of Agriculture, said on Thursday.

Texas like most U.S. states receives most of their limes form Mexico.

John Berry, who runs La Fonda, a prominent Mexican restaurant in San Antonio, said on Thursday the price he pays for a case of limes has jumped to nearly $100 from $14 last year.

"Real simple," Berry said. "We don’t buy them. We substitute lemons."

Limes are used in guacamole and to garnish beers.

Serving a margarita without a lime garnish is burning at the heart of Louis Barrios, who runs the family-owned Mexican restaurant chain "Los Barrios." But he’s doing without.

"Ninety nine percent of the time, people don’t squeeze it into the margarita anyway," Barrios says.

A combination of factors has prompted the spike in lime prices. Most limes consumed in the United States come from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Colima, and Guerrero, which have been hit by an unusual combination of cold weather and flooding, wholesalers said.

Shipments have also been disrupted by violence attributed to drug gangs, they said.

The high prices are not expected to end any time soon, according to wholesalers.